Measuring News Consumption in a Digital Era
As news outlets morph and multiply, both surveys and passive data collection tools face challenges.
Data Science
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Q&A: What works and what doesn’t when studying social media data
Ever since Friendster and Myspace gained popularity in the early 2000s, social scientists have been interested in studying the impact of…
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Using supervised machine learning to quantify political rhetoric
Several posts on this blog have examined unsupervised methods of natural language processing. These algorithms and models can help…
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Making sense of topic models
Topic models can produce clusters of words that characterize written documents. But how do we figure out what those clusters mean, exactly?
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An intro to topic models for text analysis
Topic models can scan documents, examine words and phrases within them, and “learn” groups of words that characterize those documents.
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Detecting subjectivity and tone with automated text analysis tools
There are a variety of tools that can help researchers analyze large volumes of written material. In this post, I’ll examine two of these…
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Moderates in Congress go local on Facebook more than the most ideological members
For the average moderate legislator, about 54% of a member’s Facebook posts discussed local issues between 2015 and 2017. But for the average very liberal or very conservative legislator, just 38% of posts dealt with local issues.
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Using APIs to collect website data
At Pew Research Center, we regularly use APIs to collect information for the studies we produce. Web APIs provide a means of communication between websites and users, structured by rules.
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Welcome to Decoded!
An introduction to the methodological musings, puzzles and tangles that you would see if you could flip those picture-perfect research products over.
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The news that bots share on Twitter tends not to focus on politics
On Twitter, suspected bots are far more active in sharing links to news sites focusing on nonpolitical content than to sites with a political focus.
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5 things to know about bots on Twitter
Read key findings and watch a video about our new study on how bot accounts affect the mix of content on Twitter.
